Author Archives: Jeff C

The Class of ’83

October 2, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

Vian High School’s Class of ’83 hadn’t gathered for a reunion in two decades. I brought cameras, but quickly realized that the point and purpose of the weekend was to spend the time chatting, hugging, laughing and catching up with my old classmates, rather than obsessing with a camera as I too-often do. So forgive the modest set of pictures.

There’s a famous biblical quote that ends, “Time and chance happen to them all.” The Vian High School Class of ’83 is no exception to that principle. We had our 30-year reunion last weekend. Those years had surely aged us, and sent us all down some very-different paths. But to a surprising degree, most of us were pretty much the same people we were when we graduated. In many ways, it seemed like nothing had changed, even though pretty much everything obviously had.

If you believe the conventional wisdom about high school reunions, they’re infamous as angst-ridden affairs where grown men and women return to their hometowns to revive all their adolescent insecurities and pettiness. And it seems way too many people dread or avoid them for exactly that reason.

But ours wasn’t like that at all. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. There was a lot of hugging and sincere handshaking. It was an opportunity to travel back in time and laugh like a teenager. A time to remember our friendships, our teenage antics, and our common past, and to forget most everything else. An opportunity for each of us to experience a couple of days of what high school might have been like if you could extract the awkward immaturities and replace it with the perspective that apparently requires another 30 years to develop. A comfortable mixture of things that had changed completely and things that hadn’t really changed at all.

The only disappointment of the whole process was for (and about) those who weren’t there. I know several just couldn’t make it, but several surely just chose not to come. It’s a shame – for them and for the rest of us – that they weren’t there to be part of it.

Everybody looked pretty good, so I’m sure some folks had probably lost some weight or bought new clothes or got their hair done just right before showing up in front of their classmates. But once we were all gathered up, no one much cared about your waistline or your hairline, or what you were wearing, or what jobs you’d had. Nobody cared much even about how many kids or grandkids you had (or didn’t have). They were just happy to see you. Which is how a reunion should be.

Oh! That’s me in some of the group shots. In the light bluish shirt (kneeling) in the indoor group shot above, for example. So obviously I didn’t take all the pictures. Thanks to Dan Murdoch and whoever else it was that helped me out and pushed the button for the pics that included yours truly.

Amen Corner: Angels on the Santa Fe Plaza

September 24, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

Saturday afternoon on the Santa Fe Plaza isn’t all turquoise and silver. Each corner had a duo dressed like this. A little creepy, for sure. Those angelic, silver-faced kids did not seem very happy to be out there in the Saturday sun of Santa Fe (or to have their pictures taken). I felt like maybe I should have rescued them.

Santa Fe September

September 23, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I spent last week in (and around) Santa Fe learning photography from Nevada Wier. She’s a National Geographic veteran photographer and a true world adventurer who lives in Santa Fe when she’s not in places like rural China or India or Myanmar. I came here because her photographic ‘style’ is very much what I TRY to do. My images here are a seemingly random group — the product of several smallish ‘assignments’ we did last week. The goal was not so much to gather perfect images of Santa Fe, but to practice some ideas that will work in the rest of the world. I learned a lot.

One of the assignments is in a separate post from the New Mexico State Fair. Another was to go grab a local and take some on-the-spot portraits that might reveal a little of their character — much as you might do in a more-exotic global destination. I drove to the small town of Cerillos and vowed to just grab the first person I saw and see if I could make the best of it. I wound up working instead with the third person I saw — the young cowboy’ you see in the handful of pictures below (and the big close-up above). Zach makes his living on his family’s horse ranch. I found him unloading firewood at a house near downtown Cerrillos. He was a great sport and, as it turned out, a fine impromptu model. In that last super-close-up shot, I asked him to just think about his family and his horses and his ranch, and how those things made him feel; that’s my favorite shot of the day.

Finally, a huge thank-you shout-out to my former law partner Kathy Patrick and her husband, Art Murphy. They let me spend the week in their adobe swankienda on the northwest side of Santa Fe. I was living it up with the whole place to myself!

Turquoise Midway: The State Fair of New Mexico

September 22, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I went to the fair in Albuquerque on a photo project. I’d missed the pig races and the calf scramble, so I was left to wander around the vendors and games and midway.

Regular followers of this blog will recall my post from a few weeks back about the police department raffle of an assault rifle I saw in northern Texas. Thus I was especially amused to see that even in New Mexico, your five-year old can play a carnival game and win an inflatable AK-47 in the colors of the American flag. Stating the obvious: New Mexico isn’t very far from Texas.

I wound up spending so much time at the “Spin Out” ride (below) I forgot to get myself a corndog. The efficient, solo ride operator was moving loads of passengers safely onto and off of the ride like clockwork. I watched about 15 cycles, so I had the whole process memorized. Predictably, he was way too busy to stop and let me take a real ‘portrait.’

I ran across this guy on the way back to my car as the night was winding down. He was sitting there counting money. He said his name was George Jones. When I asked if he could sing, he said everybody always asks him that. He also said that he coudn’t sing worth a damn.

The Way Out West: San Francisco and Santa Cruz, CA

September 8, 2013 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I was a week early and about a billion dollars short of being able to compete in the America’s Cup sailing race, which started Saturday in San Francisco bay. (I also lack the requisite sailing know-how). But the fog parted long enough last week to let me watch the USA Team (Oracle) practicing for the big event. Those boats can go 50mph! They have a 140-ft-tall vertical rigid “wing” rather than a traditional canvas sail, and they essentially just fly along a few feet above the water with a tiny surfboard-sized fin sticking into the surf to keep them on track.

I spent a week sightseeing and visiting friends in San Francisco and in Santa Cruz, which is 60 miles to the south, on the north side of Monterrey Bay. The San Francisco Bay area is hardly the furthest point in the U.S. away from Texas (or Oklahoma) – at least if you’re just measuring miles. But the people and the ‘culture’ may be as far from ‘Texan’ as anywhere in America. There are a surprising number of white men in dreadlocks.

Rest assured that every restaurant menu in Santa Cruz will include the words “sustainable,” “local,” “organic” “gluten,” and “GMO.” I went with friends to a vegan café where every item on the menu had a name like “I Am Renewed” and “I Am Accepting.” Ironically, the “I Am Fulfilled” was a smallish vegan salad. I had the “I Am Transformed” (which tasted a lot like a black bean taco), with a side of “I Am Refreshed.” (And I Am NotMakingThisUp).

AND: The Mexican food restaurants do not serve chile con queso!! It’s anarchy out there, I tell you!

The urban-looking pictures are San Francisco; the lighthouse, the giant redwood the seal and the coastline are around Santa Cruz. The fancy place in the first two shots is the Palace of Fine Arts. The iconic row of “Painted Lady” houses is at Alamo Park. In the orange sunrise shot, that’s Alcatraz you see peeking through the fog. The graffiti truck and the American flag are in China Town. All the nighttime shots are of (and around) the Ferry Terminal and the Bay Bridge to Oakland. A big thanks to my Costa Rica / Leadville buddies Peter and Jana Thomsen for hosting me in Santa Cruz, and to their niece Kasondra for being my tour guide in San Francisco.